Category: News

Grazed from ITProPortal. Author: Massoud Marzban.

There have been a number of stories recently in the press about some big happenings in the cloud space. IBM recently reported double-digit profits from its cloud products division, and over in the US, the state of California just announced that they are moving much of their infrastructure to a cloud-based approach.

In the past, I’ve been asked to comment on a number of these stories and I’ve been more than happy to add my two cents. But then I thought, "I’ve got much more than a few one-line quotes to share", and so I’ve decided to take off my Business Development hat for a while and try on a tech reporter’s hat for a change…

Grazed from ZDNet. Author: Alan Ho.

Earlier in July, one of the biggest cloud computing trends to make headlines in recent years celebrated another milestone when it reached its fourth birthday. OpenStack has grown and developed over the past four years, to the point where it is now garnering serious attention from IT executives and developers around the world. One region that is picking up its rate of OpenStack interest is the Asia-Pacific, which hosted the region’s first OpenStack Summit two years ago to much success.

At that event, China OpenStack User Group (COSUG) manager Hui Cheng estimated that the growing group had more than 2,500 members, making it possibly the largest user group outside of the U.S. COSUG’s China micro-blogging site, Weibo, also shows more than 2,000 members currently following the group’s foray into OpenStack…

Grazed from eWeek. Author: Darryl K. Taft.

There’s no operating system more ubiquitous than Linux. It’s everywhere. It’s even running in devices and computers you may not suspect—our cars, our cell phones, even our refrigerators. Linux supports businesses and organizations everywhere, and because it underpins open-source innovation, it is the platform of choice for new applications.

Companies such as IBM and their work with organizations like the OpenPOWER Foundation are creating such new innovations as Big Blue’s new scale-out servers running Linux and putting them in places all around us. In fact, eWEEK recently ran a slide show depicting how prevalent the operating system is in the supercomputing space…

Grazed from ComputerWorld. Author: Stephen Lawson.

A network testbed being constructed just south of San Francisco will help carriers and vendors develop standards for better cloud services, the CloudEthernet Forum says. The group’s OpenCloud Project, announced on Monday, will combine commonly used networking and computing equipment with live traffic from service providers’ commercial networks. It’s the first place researchers will be able to test new technologies designed to make cloud services more reliable and easier to set up and manage.

As enterprises put cloud-based services to work in conjunction with their own assets, it’s become hard to set up fast, reliable connections among all the components being used, according to CloudEthernet Forum President James Walker. Cloud providers may try to deliver a certain level of performance, but they don’t own the networks that link them to their customers, said Walker, who is also an executive at carrier Tata Communications…

Grazed from HDS. Author: Editorial Staff.

The world includes hundreds of millions of interconnected devices or things. These things range from handheld mobile platforms to systems that will observe the universe. At a coarse level this is what the Internet of Things (IoT) is all about: devices that are connected either directly or through a proxy to either an Intranet or the Internet.

However is there a more robust or even a formally authored standard definition? Unfortunately the state of the standards work is more immature than Cloud Computing. As recently as 2013 the European Union’s Internet of Things Architecture team states, “…after many years of heavy discussion, there is still no clear and common definition of the concept [21].” For the purposes of this paper the definition from the International Telecommunications Union is referenced…

Grazed from NewsWire. Author: PR Announcement.

Scientists from AT&T, IBM and Applied Communication Sciences (ACS) announced a proof-of-concept technology that reduces set up times for cloud-to-cloud connectivity from days to seconds. This advance is a major step forward that could one day lead to sub-second provisioning time with IP and next-generation optical networking equipment and enables elastic bandwidth between clouds at high connection request rates using intelligent cloud data center orchestrators, instead of requiring static provisioning for peak demand.

The prototype was built with contributions and expertise from AT&T, IBM and ACS, and the work was performed under the auspices of the U.S. Government’s DARPA CORONET program, which focuses on rapid reconfiguration of terabit networks. "The program was visionary in anticipating the convergence of cloud computing and networking, and in setting aggressive requirements for network performance in support of cloud services" said Ann Von Lehmen, the ACS program lead…

Grazed from SkyHigh Networks.  Author: PR Announcement.

SkyHigh Networks has moved to collaborate with SafeNet in an attempt to deliver flexible and secure key management solutions for the enterprise data in the cloud.  The partnership will help businesses retain full control of their encryption keys whilst leveraging on-premise or cloud-based models, in turn meeting the compliance needs of their corporate and regulatory requirements.

Chris Cesio, VP of business development and alliances, Skyhigh Networks, said: "More and more organisations are asking to encrypt their data in business-critical SaaS applications such as Salesforce, ServiceNow, and Microsoft Office 365 with customer-managed keys…

Grazed from ArsTechnica. Author: Dan Goodin.

Attackers have figured out a new way to get Amazon’s cloud service to wage potent denial-of-service attacks on third-party websites—by exploiting security vulnerabilities in an open source search and analytics application known as Elasticsearch. The power of Backdoor.Linux.Ganiw.a was documented earlier this month by researchers from antivirus provider Kaspersky Lab.

Among other things, the trojan employs DNS amplification, a technique that vastly increases the volume of junk traffic being directed at a victim by abusing poorly secured domain name system servers. By sending DNS queries that are malformed to appear as if they came from the victim domain, DNS amplification can boost attack volume by 10-fold or more. The technique can be especially hard to block when distributed among thousands or hundreds of thousands of compromised computers…

Grazed from TalkinCloud. Author: Chris Talbot.

Open source cloud computing is on the rise, and one vendor is hoping to take things to the next level. Odoo, formerly OpenERP, recently went through a change of name, and the company has also raised $10 million in funding to push its open source cloud marketing, but it also plans to soon release version 8 of its suite of cloud-based business services.

A media alert noted that the company has made "gentle waves" in the open source software world, but it is hoping to make a bigger splash this year. Odoo provides customers with a suite of open source business applications that are aimed at organizations with a lower level of technology experience and knowledge. Its goal is to help small and medium businesses (SMBs) with any of their online needs, from building their own websites to running ecommerce, accounting, customer relationship management (CRM), human resources, manufacturing and more…

Grazed from CSO. Author: David Braue.

IT and security leaders should arm themselves with details about the location of their corporate data and use a growing comfort with cloud computing to address policy concerns about data sovereignty, a recent Gartner analysis has recommended. The research firm’s The Snowden Effect: Data Location Matters report warned that knee-jerk reactions to questions about the physical location of corporate data were becoming increasingly difficult as a growing tide of organisations began to embrace offshore cloud services.

While tools such as encryption were in use to protect offshore data by 38 percent of 221 executives surveyed by Gartner, many organisations never got that far. With IT leaders often “entangled” in discussions on the issue with stakeholders and advisors from legal, customer, regulatory, management and other organisations, an overall fear of committing data to overseas cloud services had been reinforced by ambiguous guidance on the issue…